DuckDuckGo’s Popularity Exploded In 2013 Following The NSA/PRISM Leaks – See that graph up there? That’s a chart of how many queries the privacy-minded search engine DuckDuckGo has seen each day since early 2010. See that massive growth near the end? That’s when details of the NSA’s PRISM program first leaked. Pretty much overnight, DuckDuckGo more than doubled its traffic.

How to prevent strangers on Google+ from flooding your Gmail inbox – A new feature rolling out over the next couple of days makes it possible for any Google+ user to email you, as long as they follow you on Google+—they don’t need to know your actual email address, and you don’t even have to follow them back. And to make it even worse, Google took the Facebook approach by turning on the new feature by default. Fun, right? Not so much. I’ve already got this new “feature” in my inbox and the first thing I did was turn it off. Today, I’m going to show you how to do the same thing.

Avoid these common Facebook mistakes – Manage your timeline and news feed; delete or edit your updates, comments, and messages; and control how you share with Facebook friends and the public.

Sexting teen convicted of child pornography – A teenage girl in Canada sends naked pictures of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend to a friend and posts one picture to the victim’s Facebook page. She is more or less the same age as the victim, yet is convicted of child pornography.

26 Fitness Trackers Ranked from Worst to First – You could spend hours comparing every single feature in the 20+ fitness trackers on the market (and actually, we’ve done that), but for most people, just keep the following three things in mind….

Google+ invite earns man a night in jail, $500 fine – System-generated invitations from web services like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ can be pretty annoying. They can also land you in jail. That’s what happened to Thomas Gagnon of Massachusetts. Apparently while he was reorganizing his Google+ circles, the Big G’s notification service sprung into action and sent an invite off to his ex. Awkward? Sure. In this case, however, it was actually grounds for a call to the police.

Create a website the easy way – If you don’t want to learn the technical complexities of modern Web design, or hire someone who has already learned it, find another option. Go with a do-it-yourself online service that provides the building blocks and then hosts the site for you. There will be some limitations on how much you can customize the site design, but the results will still look good and have all of the functionality you need.

Some important facts about Android antivirus applications – Depending on which side of the fence you stand, Android anti-virus (AV) apps are a waste of time or they’re absolutely necessary. I prefer to error on the side of caution, especially when it doesn’t cost anything. If you’re wondering why I say there’s no cost, that’s because independent testing facilities, including AV-TEST GmbH say there is little difference between the paid and free versions of Android AV apps regarding their ability to locate malware on mobiles devices.

On the anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz, Anonymous hacks MIT again – One year after the activist’s suicide, Swartz’s father speaks to Boston Magazine. The protest is backed by the EFF, Demand Progress, reddit, and Mozilla, among other big players in Internet culture.The defacement no longer appears on the site, but cogen.mit.edu was down as of Saturday morning.

CES 2014: What we saw, what we loved, and what we’ll remember – The enormous, over-the-top, excess-filled Consumer Electronics Show—CES to us in the biz—has come to an end. We’ve wrapped up a week of running around Vegas like crazy people, forsaking sleep and eating in taxis or while hunched over vendor-provided buffet tables in product demo rooms.

Corsair unveils USB stick to back up smartphone, tablet – Available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, the Flash Voyager Go USB 3.0 is a way for mobile owners to beat the fact that an increasing number of devices come without an external Micro SD card slot for backup or offline storage.

Security:

Update: Breach exposes data on 110 million customers, Target now says – Up to 110 million people, about a third of the U.S. population, may be affected by a data breach at retailer Target, nearly triple the number the company first estimated in mid-December. A Target spokeswoman clarified late Friday that a 70 million figure released earlier in the day was in addition to the 40 million people the company first estimated to be affected by the breach. It was unclear earlier if the 70 million included the original 40 million victims. There may be some crossover between the two groups of victims, but Target does not know the extent of the crossover, she said.

Yahoo: Malware attack bigger than thought – Company posts guidelines for Yahoo users worried about infection and says people outside Europe may have been hit. It also says attacks went on longer than reported.

Microsoft Twitter accounts, blog hijacked by SEA – Microsoft had two Twitter accounts and an official blog compromised over the weekend in another embarrassing security incident for the Redmond giant. Attackers claiming to belong to pro-Assad group the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) managed to crack the @MSFTnews and @XboxSupport accounts on Saturday and post various messages hash-tagged “SEA”, according to Mashable.

Some Handy Email Tips For The Christie Administration – Now, we at SecurityWatch don’t condone underhanded deals (unless we get to write about them), but this story hinges on emails obtained by subpoena and we know a thing or two about how to keep your emails safe.

Workers, guards clash in hours-long Samsung factory RIOT in Vietnam – Workers reportedly beat and threw rocks at the security guards, and when police arrived to break up the scrum, they too were attacked. “Hundreds” of workers are said to have been involved in the violence. In all, between 11 and 13 people were injured in the incident – including guards, workers, and cops alike – with five of them described as having suffered serious injuries, including “brain trauma.” A Chinese news source even reported that one of the most seriously hurt had died, but this could not be confirmed.

Adrift is a Charming Color-Based Puzzle Game for iPhone and iPad – A puzzle game doesn’t need to have a bunch of arcane rules and fancy graphics to be good. Adrift doesn’t really have either and it’s one of the most challenging and engrossing puzzle games to show up on iOS in some time. All you have to do is connect the colored blocks on the cube. It’s not as simple as it sounds, but you can give it a shot for free.

Off Topic (Sort of):

A Vote in Favor of Making it Tough for Cops to Do Their Jobs– The biggest protection of the civil rights and civil liberties of Americans is sloth. Cops, prosecutors, judges, agents, marshals – everyone – are essentially lazy. They have limited resources, limited ability to investigate and prosecute, and therefore set priorities about what crimes to go after and what to let slide. Even when they decide to go after a crime, they have limited resources to dedicate to the investigation. Installing a video surveillance takes time, resources, money, and requires monitoring, minimization, and technical skills. They aren’t going to waste these resources on silly cases. Until now. (suggested by Aseem S.)

How Israel and Hamas weaponized social media – More militaries and armed groups are using social media as a weapon of war — but when ground skirmishes are mirrored by cyber-social battles, managing the message can get messy.

Alaska town still offline after New Year’s revelry takes down Internet – New Year’s is little more than yester-week’s memory, serving as the landing pad for millions who spent the last day of 2013 celebrating. For one Alaskan town, the New Year also came sans Internet access, something that still persists ten days later. The reason? Tradition, and poor judgment when some possibly inebriated individual decided where to shoot his shotgun.

Algorithm finds that the secret to being a successful writer is to knock off the crap – The algorithm, designed by a group of computer scientists — a profession historically known for its strict creative writing skill — from Stony Brook University, can analyze a book and determine whether or not it will become successful. Among the data points of writing style, engaging storyline, and novelty, “interestingness” is also quantified, putting the stellar writing skills of computer scientists on display. Despite the actual scientists’ writing ability, the algorithm works.

3D Systems Chef Jet and Pro eyes-on: legitimizing 3D printed food – In the 3D realm of CES 2014 we caught up with 3D Systems, a crew that brought so many new products and services to the show that it was difficult keeping up with it all! Two of the more late-breaking items we were introduced to were the Chef Jet and the Chef Jet Pro, both of them capable food-safe 3D printing. Both printers are fully certified and ready to head to the kitchen this year.

Something to think about:

“The moments that we have with friends and family, the chances that we have to make a big difference in the world or even to make a small difference to the ones we love, all those wonderful chances that life gives us, life also takes away. It can happen fast and a whole lot sooner than you think.”

– Larry Page

Today’s Free Downloads:

HDDExpert 1.10 – HDDExpert gives you a crystal-clear vision of your Hard Drive (HDD or SSD) health and performance and translates S.M.A.R.T. attributes into a readable indication. It then recommends maintenance (fans upgrade, spare purchase, backups and more) depending on the amount of failures detected on your hard drives.

SyncFolders – SyncFolders helps you to synchronize the contents of two folders, including any subfolders. The folders may be on different disk drives, on the network, or storage devices attached to the USB port, including external hard disk drives, flash drives, and any other type of USB storage device.

Multi Commander – Multi Commander is a multi-tabbed file manager that is an alternative to the standard Windows Explorer. It uses the very popular and efficient dual-panel layout. Multi Commander has a everything you need in your daily works with files to make your work fast and efficient. It has all the standard features like a file manager has like copy, move, rename, view. But Multi Commanders big strength is the special features that allow you to do advanced task with ease. Like Auto-unpacking, Auto-sorting, Browse inside archives, Workspace support, Scripting, Searching and a lot more. And it allows you to do everything from the keyboard.

In Pursuit of Freedom – The Pushback Continues:

U.K., Canadian Firms Wary of U.S. Cloud After NSA Leaks – A new Peer 1 Hosting survey of 300 U.K. and Canadian businesses reveals that 25 percent of organizations are moving their data outside of the American cloud storage system, citing security and data privacy concerns. Despite this country’s reputation as a popular location for data hosting, it falls behind Canada, the U.K., Switzerland, and Germany in terms of companies’ international trust; Canada leads the pack with 72 percent total confidence, while America lands at 51 percent.

Stephen Colbert urged to cancel speech for NSA-linked privacy firm RSA – Privacy rights groups are calling on comedian Stephen Colbert to cancel his guest speaker appearance at a conference organised by RSA, the security firm accused of accepting millions from the National Security Agency to weaken encryption software. The host of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report is due to be the closing speaker at RSA’s annual conference in San Francisco in February. A number of security experts scheduled to speak at the conference have already dropped out following reports that RSA was paid $10m by the NSA to distribute a flawed encryption that allowed the security agency to bypass security protections on personal computers and other products.

John McCain seeks congressional investigation into ‘broken’ NSA – The Obama administration is desperate to draw a line under the controversy that has engulfed the NSA over the last six months. The president’s proposals are partly based on the findings of a major review, commissioned in the aftermath of the Snowden disclosures, which recommended, among other things, that the agency should no longer collect and store domestic phone records. McCain told CNN on Sunday that Congress was probably going to need to pass legislation to implement Obama’s recommendations, and was obliged to run its own investigation into the wider controversy over US surveillance. “Is there anybody believes that this system is not broken in many respects? I think not,” he said.

Just thought you might find this video interesting. I don’t think this has been posted here…▶ Google is Going to Blackmail You – YouTube
And I hate the new signon. I have 2 GOOGLE emails. It takes me about 20 mins to figure out how to get to the other one. PITA.

Re: Teenager reported to police after reporting vulnerability in government website

Yes, this is typical of Governments down here, because they know best, don’t you know. Actually they don’t, and never have. Obviously the Victorian government stuck its head up its own ass and hoped nobody would find out. Until they fixed it, if they were ever going to.

Just another example of the downside of the Parliamentary system. Small minded dictatorial morons (barrel scraped intellectuals), who are driven by ideology rather than common sense. So yes, it seems to me “they know best, don’t you know”, is part and parcel of the all inclusive “nanny sate” madness.

Parliamentary systems need a complete overhaul so that the will of the electorate becomes the primary focus. Dream on baby!

Hi Bill,
Re: Yahoo Malware attack.
I’m on my soapbox today, so here goes lol.
I use Yahoo Mail every day, and have never had this problem. Why? Java is not installed and never will be.

Just about everytime someone calls me about their computer being infected, the problem traces back to Java, which I think is just about the most hackable piece of crap that ever existed. But mostly they still use it and I usually get another call down the track.

Blogroll

Daves Computer Tips
Our goal is, and always has been, “To become the best source of easy to understand, plain English computer and tech information on the internet while helping others to better understand computers and technology.”

Manitoulin Island Web Design
Pat Keenan here, at your service, but call me POKO – I’m a nighthawk staying up until all hours so if you need to call, kindly do so after 11AM.

Paul Andrew Russell ~ poet
An excellent poetry site written by my good friend. If you’re looking for prose to ponder then, drop in on Paul.

What's On My PC
The intent of this blog is to share my knowledge base of computers, software, gadgets and information technology in terms that is presentable and understandable to ALL; and at the same time feed my obsession for information technology by learning from oth